About Me

By day, I perform strategic marketing duties for MorphoTrak (a subsidiary of Morpho, a subsidiary of Safran). By night, I manage the Empoprises blogging empire, as well as various virtual properties in Starfleet Commander and other games. Formerly known as Ontario Emperor (Ontario California, not Ontario Canada). LCMS Lutheran. Former member of Radio Shack Battery Club. Motorola Yellow Badge recipient. Top 10% of LinkedIn users.

Thursday, May 11, 2017

You know those inspirational animations or videos that you see on the Internet? They're usually completely unsourced, but are designed to move your soul. Usually they have wording that reads something like this.

One day an elderly man was at the beach.
He was a veteran of the war.
No, not a military war.
He was a veteran of the War on Poverty.
He lost both his legs in the Second Battle of the Office of Economic Opportunity.
He lost his left arm in the Hearst Food Distribution in 1974.
He lost his right arm two decades later, during the Clinton Welfare Reform skirmishes.
So he was there at the beach, thinking about the twists and turns in his life.
Just then a stray dog wandered up to him.
The dog licked the man's wounds.
The dog gave the man his own dry dog food.
The dog used his nose to push his half-full water dish over to the man.
The man ate and drank, the first meal that he had had in two hours.
This allowed the elderly man to survive and face another day.
This reminds us that the dogs of war are always less powerful than the dogs of peace.

As these words scroll on the screen, they are superimposed upon a picture of something beautiful and inspirational. Something like this.

Yes, I've used a form of this picture before, for a song for my alternate music project, Wasp the Houseboy. (No, I haven't publicly mentioned this outside of Facebook before. So this is a scoop for the open Internet.)

And you may see a form of the picture again for my main music project, Ontario Emperor. Because while I am not assembling one of those inspirational thingies, I am working on the beautiful music that would go with one of them.

At the moment, the song is called "For a Meaningful Apocryphal Animation." Although it's not yet complete, I really like the way that it's sounding so far - so much so that I wanted to listen to it on the way to work this morning. But rather than haul my personal computer into my car and playing the song from there, I simply used the MIDI Opener app from my phone and played it that way.

Now this is not a perfect solution - among other things, I don't have Don Allen's Timbres of Heaven soundfont (previously mentioned) on my phone, so I was just using a pretty basic soundfont. But it still let me listen to the basics of the MIDI file, and since MIDI Opener can auto-repeat, I could listen all the way to work, hands-free.

In fact, the bad sound actually helped, because I could pay attention to some of the other details in the song. Like how I need to add three percussive sounds to transition from the chorus to the second (verseless) verse. And how I have too many danged notes in the first (verseless) verse, so I probably ought to get rid of a few of them.

I'll keep you posted on the progres of "For a Meaningful Apocryphal Animation," as well as other stuff, as appropriate. I can't really take five years off between albums, so you'll probably hear about this sooner rather than later.

Driving While Musicing, even without Don Allen (and Wasp the Houseboy news)

You know those inspirational animations or videos that you see on the Internet? They're usually completely unsourced, but are designed to move your soul. Usually they have wording that reads something like this.

One day an elderly man was at the beach.
He was a veteran of the war.
No, not a military war.
He was a veteran of the War on Poverty.
He lost both his legs in the Second Battle of the Office of Economic Opportunity.
He lost his left arm in the Hearst Food Distribution in 1974.
He lost his right arm two decades later, during the Clinton Welfare Reform skirmishes.
So he was there at the beach, thinking about the twists and turns in his life.
Just then a stray dog wandered up to him.
The dog licked the man's wounds.
The dog gave the man his own dry dog food.
The dog used his nose to push his half-full water dish over to the man.
The man ate and drank, the first meal that he had had in two hours.
This allowed the elderly man to survive and face another day.
This reminds us that the dogs of war are always less powerful than the dogs of peace.

As these words scroll on the screen, they are superimposed upon a picture of something beautiful and inspirational. Something like this.

Yes, I've used a form of this picture before, for a song for my alternate music project, Wasp the Houseboy. (No, I haven't publicly mentioned this outside of Facebook before. So this is a scoop for the open Internet.)

And you may see a form of the picture again for my main music project, Ontario Emperor. Because while I am not assembling one of those inspirational thingies, I am working on the beautiful music that would go with one of them.

At the moment, the song is called "For a Meaningful Apocryphal Animation." Although it's not yet complete, I really like the way that it's sounding so far - so much so that I wanted to listen to it on the way to work this morning. But rather than haul my personal computer into my car and playing the song from there, I simply used the MIDI Opener app from my phone and played it that way.

Now this is not a perfect solution - among other things, I don't have Don Allen's Timbres of Heaven soundfont (previously mentioned) on my phone, so I was just using a pretty basic soundfont. But it still let me listen to the basics of the MIDI file, and since MIDI Opener can auto-repeat, I could listen all the way to work, hands-free.

In fact, the bad sound actually helped, because I could pay attention to some of the other details in the song. Like how I need to add three percussive sounds to transition from the chorus to the second (verseless) verse. And how I have too many danged notes in the first (verseless) verse, so I probably ought to get rid of a few of them.

I'll keep you posted on the progres of "For a Meaningful Apocryphal Animation," as well as other stuff, as appropriate. I can't really take five years off between albums, so you'll probably hear about this sooner rather than later.